Aeration of substantial bodies of water to provide an oxidizer for such purposes as odor control, elimination of substances with a high biological or biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) is a well-established art. The objective is to inject oxygen into the body of water where it will attend to the problem. Bodies of water which require such treatment suffer from an overload of offensive materials, and from an inadequate source of oxygen to attend to it.
There are many methods of supplying additional oxygen to the body of water. Well-known examples are bubbling air through it, spraying the water in the air to take on oxygen, and returning it to the body of water, and running water from the body of water through a venturi type injector to pick up air and return oxygen-enriched water to the parent body of water.
Having in mind the widespread need for treatment of such water, and the long duration of the need, it is surprising that there still remained to be invented an elegantly simple system which can provide important improvements over existing equipment and processes. But this invention does provide such an improvement.
Supplying oxygen to the body of water does only minimal good unless it is supplied in a manner such that it can be taken up quickly and efficiently, and unless it reaches into regions which require it. Sprayers, bubblers and circulating pumps represent efforts to increase the volumetric extent of the regions being treated. However, these and other common expedients face the vagaries of the geometry of the body of water, and often involve inefficient means to take up oxygen both in a recirculating stream and in the body of water itself.
It is an object of this invention to provide an importantly increased amount of dissolved oxygen in water to be injected into the body of water, accompanied by a myriad of micro-bubbles containing oxygen and other gases from the air, and then to inject this treated water into the body of water through an especially advantageous nozzle.
It is an object of this nozzle to discharge its effluent into the body of water in such a pattern that its effluent plume is importantly enlarged, so as to draw and mix into it a substantial amount of surrounding water, thereby further "amplifying" the effectiveness of the already oxygen-enriched water by actively mixing it in a vigorously turbulent enlarging region in the body of water, caused by the nozzle itself.